If you’re running a large legal department, you’ve likely seen the moment where your filing system becomes a chaotic maze.
What starts as "a few emails" eventually spirals into scattered documents, missed deadlines, and approval bottlenecks. Contract management challenges don't just affect the legal department; they ripple out across the entire business.
In other words, when Legal is slow, Sales can't close, Procurement can't buy, and Finance loses visibility into future obligations.
Based on our work with enterprise legal operations, here are the five most persistent challenges that hinder enterprise velocity:
- Exponential Volume vs. Flat Headcount: As businesses scale, contract volume grows exponentially while legal headcount stays nearly flat. Manual review of every clause leads to burnout and, inevitably, missed risks.
- The "Black Hole" of Visibility: 86% of companies struggle with manual management, leading to contracts being stored in departmental silos. If you can't see your contracts, you can't manage the 92-minute review cycles or the missed renewals that lead to financial penalties.
- Intricate Regulatory Complexity: With expanding global regulations and security requirements, contracts are becoming more complex. Managing multiple jurisdictions and intricate provisions manually is no longer sustainable.
- Approval Bottlenecks: Another persistent challenge is the "waiting game." Without automated routing, a contract can sit on a VP’s desk for a week simply because it didn't have a clear "Front Door" for intake.
- The "Third-Party Paper" Trap: Lastly, many teams lose hundreds of hours trying to compare a vendor’s template against their company standards without a centralized playbook.
Overcoming these hurdles requires more than just new tech; it requires a shift in how the department functions. To move from a bottleneck to a business enabler, consider these three operational "plays":
1. Transition to "Exception-Based" Review
Stop reviewing every line of every NDA. Most enterprise teams waste 60% of their time on low-risk clauses.
2. Implement a "Front Door" Intake Policy
The "Black Hole" of visibility usually starts with an email.
- The Play: Mandate that all legal requests come through a single intake portal. This allows you to track the "velocity" of a contract from the moment it’s requested, not just when it hits a lawyer's desk. It turns "where is my contract?" into a real-time status bar for the Sales team.
3. Close the "Post-Signature" Data Loop
The biggest financial losses happen after the contract is signed.
- The Play: Treat the signed PDF as a data source. "Sling" the key obligations—like price escalators or termination windows—directly into your ELM strategy dashboards. This ensures that Finance is alerted 90 days before a renewal, rather than finding out when the invoice hits.
Conclusion: Turning Friction into Velocity
And there you have it!
We hope this guide has been helpful in identifying—and solving—the hurdles that keep enterprise legal departments from reaching their full potential.
As a quick recap, keep these three principles in mind:
- Contracting is a Team Sport: Eliminate silos by giving Sales and Procurement visibility into the workflow.
- Data Over Documents: Treat every contract as a source of business intelligence, not just a signed piece of paper.
- Automate to Scale: You cannot hire your way out of a volume problem; you must automate your way out.
If you have any other questions regarding how to implement these solutions or want to learn more about automating third-party contract review, feel free to book a demo with us!
We’ll be more than happy to speak with you!
